Unit Teaching

Units are often considered the building blocks of successful instruction. When a teacher is assigned a particular subject or course to teach, one of the first tasks he or she approaches is the breaking up of the course into a series of units of instruction. The reasons for this approach vary, but although students, and often their teachers, find it difficult to conceptualize an entire course ranging across a 10-month span of time, it is also difficult to assist students in the creation of meaning using only daily lesson plans. Unit teaching provides a structure whereby teachers can work with students to achieve learning goals while creating meaning by providing a larger, less fragmented approach to instruction, a goal congruent with both Gestalt psychology and information-processing learning theory. Unit planning is historically credited to Johann F. Herbart and Henry C. Morrison with a variety of curriculum specialists recommending adaptations, for example, William Kilpatrick's project method. A teaching unit is generally conceived as a 2- to 6-week block of instruction depending on the topic and the developmental stages of the students.

Units are generally divided into two major categories: resource units and teaching units. Most “methods of instruction” textbooks, regardless of subject or grade level, recognize this division. The resource unit is an all-encompassing, general approach that enables teachers to select and modify materials for a specific instructional group (class). As such, there is more material in a resource unit than any individual teacher would be able to use when teaching the unit topic. The teaching unit is an instructional block that is targeted at a specific group of students. Teachers frequently adapt resource units, designed either commercially or collaboratively, into teaching units for their individual classrooms.

Regardless of the category, units usually include the following components: title/topic; rationale or justification for study; unit goals (general) and objectives (specific) in cognitive (knowledge), affective (values), and skills domains; daily lesson plans aligned with unit goals and objectives including a variety of instructional strategies (differentiated activities to meet the needs of all learners); a list of materials and resources needed for unit completion; and, an assessment plan to ensure that goals and objectives have been learned. Recently, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe have advocated “backward design” by moving the assessment plan to the forefront of the unit and lesson plan, immediately following listed goals and objectives. This is to encourage teachers to consider the curricular alignment aspects of unit and lesson planning rather than viewing units simply as a collection of activities around a common topic. Evaluation consists of both formative and summative assessment regardless of design technique.

Units may be classified by their approach to teaching the material. Subject matter units can be single subject or fused, for example, a language arts unit rather than separate spelling, literature, and writing units. Units may be further integrated [Page 910]in either a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary manner. This means that units can be correlated among teachers so that students either are studying the same chronological period in both language arts and social studies or the same conceptual theme or topic, such as space, in multiple subjects. That would mean that all students would spend time studying units on the concept of space as used in multiple subjects such as science, math, English, and social studies but these units would not necessarily relate to one another. These multidisciplinary approaches are not the same as a truly interdisciplinary unit such as a project or a problem-solving approach where students would be called on to integrate any subjects necessary to solve the problem or complete the project under study. This approach can be used either within a subject areafor example, social studies or general scienceor across subject areas. These latter units are significantly more student centered in their approach than are more traditional units.

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